2023/10/25 by Camille Bourgaux, Bourgaux, Camille, Ana Ozaki +3
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Computer Science · Decision Sciences · #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Biomedical Text Mining and Ontologies #Databases (cs.DB) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Logic in Computer Science (cs.LO) #Scientific Computing and Data Management #Semantic Web and Ontologies
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2310.16472
openalex publication_date 2023/10/25 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
We investigate semiring provenance--a successful framework originally defined in the relational database setting--for description logics. In this context, the ontology axioms are annotated with elements of a commutative semiring and these annotations are propagated to the ontology consequences in a way that reflects how they are derived. We define a provenance semantics for a language that encompasses several lightweight description logics and show its relationships with semantics that have been defined for ontologies annotated with a specific kind of annotation (such as fuzzy degrees). We show that under some restrictions on the semiring, the semantics satisfies desirable properties (such as extending the semiring provenance defined for databases). We then focus on the well-known why-provenance, for which we study the complexity of problems related to the provenance of an assertion or a conjunctive query answer. Finally, we consider two more restricted cases which correspond to the so-called positive Boolean provenance and lineage in the database setting. For these cases, we exhibit relationships with well-known notions related to explanations in description logics and complete our complexity analysis. As a side contribution, we provide conditions on an ELHI_\bot ontology that guarantee tractable reasoning.